Nikita DiakurUgly Memories

Diakur first coined the term Ugly for his 2017 short of the same name, a fractured faux folktale that reimagines a sentimental internet story about an abused cat. The film’s deliberately skewed colour palettes and distorted character models serve the internal logic of what Diakur called the Ugly. By framing this setting as a world in its own right, he positions each following work not as a standalone piece, but as a chapter in a broader, continuously unfolding universe.

While Diakur’s practice is rooted in simulation and system-driven 3D animation, it does not exclude reality. Personal footage, compositional cues, and material such as audio captures drawn from his own environment often enter the work, folded into the digital scaffolding of Ugly. These fragments sit alongside the fallibility and unpredictability of his simulations, reinforcing a digital vision of analogue life that feels unvarnished and instinctively true. This interplay between observation and invention, between external reality and internal logic, is what gives the work its emotional charge, not because it seeks realism, but because it allows space for contradiction, failure, and the unspoken rhythms of the everyday to persist within a digital frame.

Diakur treats the Ugly universe as an open platform, frequently releasing work-in-progress sketches, behind-the-scenes clips, and follow-up shorts that expand its cast of characters, geographies and its strange, physics-driven logic. By leaving the digital scaffolding visible, simulation rigs, interface tools, broken physics, he invites the audience into the machinery of the work’s creation. This transparency reinforces the sense that Ugly is less a product than a process: art as open experiment rather than finished object.

“Ugly” feels alive because it resists finality; its landscapes and inhabitants constantly recombine and fracture and we see an environment whose only stability is found in a state of flux. Through this it’s clear that every shot is a transient glimpse of a larger, unruly system, where no single viewpoint can claim authority. Diakur’s universe gestures toward the uncentered chaos of our lived experience, its digital strangeness is grounded in the same disorder, plurality, and unpredictability that define our world. By rejecting a figurative, traditional approach, Diakur’s work makes the digital feel less like an escape, and more like reflection; messy, vulnerable, and real.

Diakur’s latest series, “Ugly Memories” presented through SOLOS, documents the long-form construction of Ugly, not via a single project, but through a constellation of works developed across the last ten years of his practice. These pieces, though varied in form and focus, are united by the same chaotic internal logic that animates his broader universe: an environment where meaning emerges not from control, but from interruption and unpredictability. Rather than offering a linear progression, the collection unfolds as a fragmented, accumulative mapping of a digital terrain defined by instability, offering glimpses into a world that is at once absurd, fragile, and uniquely human.